Wednesday, August 3, 2011

WIP Screenshots of AVWW Crafting Workbenches

New WIP screenshots to share! These ones including some new art by the awesome Phil, who you might recall as the artist behind Tidalis, AI War 2.0, and The Zenith Remnant.

Phil has mostly been working on freelance work with other indies since Arcen hit financial difficulties last year when Tidalis got off to a rocky start financially (despite rave reviews). We've long since clawed our way back out of the hole we'd found ourselves in a year ago, but a renewed sense of caution (as well as experience doing all the new art for AI War 4.0 and Light of the Spire) has meant that I'm doing the art for AVWW using my talents as well as various commodity art (a way outdated post on my pipeline here).

At any rate, when it comes to some really specialized things in AVWW -- like the workbenches and wind shelters -- I was really having trouble coming up with anything that would look special enough. These are really tricky concepts to get across, since it's not like just showing a black smith's shop or a wizard's tent or whatever. We have no less than 9 different kinds of crafting benches, and making them look distinct, interesting, clear, and in keeping with the theme of the game was really sending me in circles.

So I called on Phil -- and I think the results are pretty awesome. Here's a peek at them, with screenshots I took out of the Unity 3D editor (so there's an extra bar at the top of the screens, and the bottom are cut off -- that's just because they're straight out of the editor, don't worry).

Left To Right: Disenchant, Socketing, Memory Archive

Left To Right: Spellgem, Architect, Crestsmith

Left To Right: Scrollmaker, Spellshaping, Enchant

About The 9 Kinds Of Workbenches
Not all of these are actually crafting benches, I should clarify.

For instance, the memory archive is a place where you can deposit memory crystals to try to piece together various mysteries in the world. Sometimes this could be the background of the local evil overlord, sometimes it's a piece of the world's backstory (which varies from game to game), etc.

And when it comes to the enchant/disenchant benches, those are for applying permanent affects to yourself, or taking them off if you want to replace them with new enchantments. We'll explain more on that later, but it's something that's a bit more advanced and that you probably won't be doing until slightly later in the game (as with crests).

Then we have the socketing workbench, which is all about configuring what spellgems and spellshaping gems go in your crests. It's not so much about crafting something new as it is about configuring something new with stuff you already crafted.

That leaves us with the five actual categories of crafting that we talked about in the previous diary.